The Plot Against Hip Hop (17 page)
They turned into a long hallway of polished wood and paintings. “You know who Romare Bearden is?”
“I’ve heard of him. This is his work?”
“His
Migration
series.” There were about ten paintings on each side of the hallway. Inky black figures against verdant green backgrounds. “Bearden wanted to capture the journey of our people from the South to the North. We went from a rural people to an industrialized race. Northern factories needed unskilled labor and they recruited us, D. It changed us too. Never been the same since. Never will be the same again.”
“My parents came from Virginia and took the Greyhound bus to New York.”
“Mine went from Mississippi to Chicago. But I became myself out here in Hollywood, D. Made a pretty good life for myself in this place.”
“No doubt.”
“And all I’ve ever wanted to do was to make sure as many of us as possible could follow my example.”
“That’s what everybody says, man. They say you give back.”
“That’s good to hear. What else have you got in this world, really, but your reputation?”
They came to a large metallic door and Amos entered a security code into a wall panel. There was a clicking sound and Amos pushed the door open to a room that looked like a funky bar from the era of platform shoes. In contrast to the more refined ambiance of the rest of the house, this den was all red and black, like the label on the Johnnie Walker bottles set up behind the red leather–trimmed bar on one side of the room. On the other side was a wall of framed photos, large and small, of Amos with Curtis Mayfield, Muhammad Ali, young Jesse “I Am Somebody” Jackson, Don Cornelius, a slender, very sexy Chaka Khan, and a bunch of other bushy-haired, bell-bottomed folks D didn’t recognize.
“This is who you really are, isn’t it?” he asked in a tone that suggested he’d been let in on a secret.
“Guess you could say that, though the rest of the house is me too. They just reflect different parts of me. Have a seat.”
Amos sat behind a battered old dark wood desk and D took a seat across from him in a lumpy black leather chair, which felt like an artifact from the no-money-down furniture stores in every ghetto he’d ever seen. The contrast between the elegant and the tacky in Amos’s home was so stark that D wondered for a moment if the old man was schizophrenic.
“I knew Dwayne Robinson,” Amos said, which immediately brought D back to the here and now. “He was a nice guy and a damn good writer. His was a loss that affects everyone who loves black music.”
“Yeah,” D agreed and nodded, though suddenly he felt very cold. He could feel that Amos was gonna tell him something about Dwayne’s death, something only a person with his wealth and contacts could know. The idea scared D.
“You probably didn’t know that Dwayne did some work for me.”
D said he didn’t.
“Yeah. First it was a bio or two for some acts I was involved with. He even wrote a speech for a black congressman I was supporting. But the main thing he did for me was this.”
Amos reached into a drawer, pulled out a pile of papers, and tossed them on the desk. D picked them up, looked at the cover sheet, and then put them down, as if they were cursed, which, in a profound way, they were. It was a clean, freshly printed version of the Sawyer memorandum.
“I commissioned it and had Dwayne come on board to help shape it. Think I paid him the most money he’d ever made at that point. More than he got for writing
The Relentless Beat,
for sure.”
“Why is he dead?” D stood up, his voice and body language menacing, all his reverence for the man evaporated in that instant. D wanted to ask,
Why did you have him killed?
but that might be premature or, hopefully, wrong. Yet he damn well knew Amos had the answer to
Why?
“Figured you’d want to get right down to it,” Amos said, seemingly not at all stressed by the other man’s anger.
D figured there were probably eight cameras on him and two retired Mossad operatives ready to come down from the ceiling. So he just stood there waiting for more, steeling himself for the worst.
“To a degree, you could say Dwayne got himself killed, but I’m not gonna blame him for having a conscience. He just made a couple of dangerous people uncomfortable. Just like you have.”
“If you brought me into your fucking museum to threaten me, fuck you. I don’t scare easy.” Now D didn’t care about the cameras or the security team on their way to snatch him up. He’d kill the fat old bastard if he had to.
Amos stood up with his palms outstretched in a calming gesture. “I know how fearless you are, D. That’s why you’re here. I know you’re gonna face this head-on. That’s what you’ve been trying to do, but you didn’t know enough to do it right. If you died of that virus you got, that would be one thing, right? But if you died over something you didn’t totally understand, well, what the fuck would that be? A waste, right? I don’t want you to waste another moment of your life.”
D knew this was prime-quality bullshit. No wonder this fat little black man had so much juice. He could really run his red lips. “All right,” D nearly shouted. “You commissioned the memorandum. You hired Dwayne. You obviously knew Malik and he worked for you too. So why does a twenty-year-old pile of paper get people killed?”
The portly businessman sat back down behind his desk and gestured with his hands for D to do likewise. Slowly D backed down, but tried not to plop into the seat. He wanted to ease in slowly, with control. Instead, he almost tripped moving backward into the leather chair.
Amos didn’t laugh (though it did seem to amuse him) cause he had a long story to share. “What I’m about to tell you,” he began, “will change everything you think about hip hop and, maybe, your life.”
D sighed and slumped deeper into the worn leather chair.
R
ight after Run-D.M.C.’s hit with ‘Walk This Way,’ I commissioned the Sawyer Group to create a detailed report on the nature, marketability, and long-term potential of hip hop culture. It took them eight months, but soon as that document came across my desk, I read it cover to cover. Your man Robinson had a nice, very direct prose style.
“At the time I was in a unique position in the industry. I’d carved out a place as the black person white boys at the record labels looked to for recommendations on new executive talent and for who producers/songwriters should make label deals with. If a black attorney or young junior exec at the black music department was ready to take a leap, or if an up-and-coming producer was thirsty for his own distributed label, they came to me and I made sure someone at Sony, RCA, Warner Bros., or PolyGram was aware. If there was a deal to be made, I’d put it in motion. Sometimes I negotiated the whole thing; sometimes I just took a piece and played the background.”
“You were what, the black godfather of R&B?”
“Call it what you will. But I had a lot of influence and I used it wisely.”
“How’d you get to be that man?”
“Money. I was a generous contributor to both Democrats and Republicans in Cali and around the country. I gave to Jesse in ’84 and ’88, and I gave to Ronnie in ’84 and to Bush I in ’88. All the labels’ corporate parents were in bed with politicians for their other businesses. I had the ability to speak to both sides. My rep for having influence trickled down to every level of the record game.”
“But you didn’t believe in anything, did you?”
“No, young man, I believed in
everything
. I was for civil rights and for free-flowing capitalism too. I could feel both affirmative action and supply-side economics. I wasn’t ashamed to call Orrin Hatch or Teddy Kennedy my friend. I saw the flow of history and was pragmatic in floating down that river.”
“And hip hop scared you, didn’t it?”
“The rough part of being in LA is that sometimes you can’t see past the 5 highway. It didn’t scare me, but it did surprise me. And all the other corporate gate keepers out here too. But I was determined to catch up. The fact that it had an explicit, and implicit, political edge, that it had produced Chuck D and KRS-One, and was engaged with the Nation of Islam and the antiapartheid movement, made my antenna stand up. It was connecting the dots in a way that R&B hadn’t since the ’70s.”
“And that worried you?”
“It worried all of us.”
“Us?”
“All the black folks who mattered. All the black folks who’d given our sweat and, in some cases, lives to open the few doors that were already open. This wasn’t gonna be the Panthers again—smart young brothers with some good ideas who lost themselves in macho shit. This time we were gonna give them direction.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, through my contacts in the GOP I got wind of the fact that one of the researchers of the Sawyer memorandum, a Malik Jones, was actually an undercover FBI agent working the angle that hip hop was a convenient cover for arms transportation, drug smuggling, and other illegal forms of interstate commerce. So I got in touch with Malik, who by then was living in Ladera Heights, and made him an offer.”
“Be your eyes and ears.”
“Yes.”
“He’d feed you info and you’d use your contacts to help him seem more credible in the industry. It doesn’t sound so bad on the surface. But obviously it got out of hand.”
“Yes.” A long pause. “Two things happened. The first was that Malik began to like playing gangsta more than playing record mogul. Right alongside his pals in the Rampart Division, he began to be seduced, just like everyone, I guess, by the fucking splendor of gangsterdom. Suge Knight had been my bodyguard at one point. I hooked Malik up with Suge during the time that, at my suggestion, we began moving Dr. Dre over to Interscope.”
“Cause you were down with the Interscope crew.”
“Just doing business. You see, I’d been a part owner of Macola Records, who distributed almost all the West Coast rap in that early period. That guy who owned Ruthless began acting like he was actually running things. Tried to renege on a deal we had for ownership of Ruthless and a bigger piece of the NWA pie. So I had Malik and Suge pull NWA away from Ruthless. Everyone thinks it was about Suge and Eazy. It was really about a business deal gone bad.
“Anyway, I became a silent partner in Priority, who signed Cube once he left NWA. My main goal was to control, one way or another, Ruthless’ assets, which was basically Dre and Cube.”
“But putting Malik with Suge and the whole West Coast gangsta rap scene eventually bit you in the ass.”
“I got the marks here on my right butt cheek.”
“Okay. What was this other element you mentioned?”
“I had my hooks into the emerging West Coast scene when that was about to blow. But you can’t really claim hip hop—at least you couldn’t at that time—without a New York presence. It was still the core of the culture—it was still where hit acts were being created. Malik, though he was from Jersey, was now too West Coast–identified to work as a source/agent back east. On his recommendation we approached Eric Mayer, a very able, street-smart guy from Englewood who was a Jersey state policeman at the time. He’d been something of a wigger before the term even existed. And he was Jewish.”
“How did that help?”
“The New York record business, from the corporate offices on Sixth Avenue to the indie labels downtown, was either owned or corun by young Jewish guys. Shit, Russell Simmons didn’t have a bar mitzvah but most folks who knew him back then swore he wore a yarmulke under his fishing cap. All his partners were young Jewish guys. So I needed someone who could roll with them, get their confidence, and learn their secrets and vulnerabilities. Eric was perfect. He really was the suburban kid seduced by the culture. By his first summer on the job Malik was reporting to me that Eric was in the mix, he was playing basketball in the Hamptons with Russell. So now I had well-connected operatives on both coasts. But where Malik became too gangsta, Eric went native too. He saw East Coast hip hop as his true calling. Though it was in some weird neocon-meets–old school way I still don’t understand. And over time he started his own marketing company, started throwing his own events …”
“And you lost control.”
“I wish it was that simple. For six years or so, I had both Malik and Eric listening to me, feeding me info while I helped them make strategic moves. We guided Death Row to Interscope. We helped Russ and Lyor move Def Jam to PolyGram after the Sony deal went sour. You wanna know why Suge never went after Russell like he did Puff? Cause between Malik and Eric, I made sure that didn’t happen. I was making so much dough off both, I didn’t need the grief. We even gave seed money to that Gibbs in New York who sets up MCs with brands. We were the silent hand of capitalism behind hip hop’s growth in the ’90s.”
“What happened to the politics?”
“You tell me. The political acts started making bad records. Simple as that.”
“Simple as that, huh? So did you have anything to do with crack coming into the hood? I mean, that’s what really changed everything—the culture and the music.”
“I had nothing to do with that. Not personally.”
“But you were involved with the government. With the FBI and, maybe, the CIA. C’mon. You gonna come clean or not?”
“In the early ’80s, a few entrepreneurs in Texas identified building and maintaining prisons as a great business for a spread-out state with lots of small towns. Construction jobs. Food and laundry supplies. Uniforms. The prisoners can work for third world wages. Motels for visitors. Car rentals. The economic benefits went on and on.”
“But they needed a way to fill these new prisons up.”
“Right. Freebasing was popular out here and in a few other parts of the country for a while.”
“Richard Pryor.”
“Yeah. Coke was expensive, so you needed money if you were just gonna sit there and cook it all day. But when the crack thing started to happen, you had the perfect storm—an addictive, crime-inducing product, a demand for more prisons, and, along with that, mandatory sentencing for possession of small amounts of crack rock. So it wasn’t some simple CIA plot. It was a group of like-minded individuals in Texas, California, and Colombia who came together and connected these dots.”